How much time does it take to eReport?
Candid has partnered with several grants management software providers to make sharing grants data with us easy. These partners have created pre-formatted reports you can use to export your data, and/or provide support with eReporting. Learn more here.
Which organizations share their grants data with Candid?
For a complete list of organizations that share their grants data with Candid, please see our data sharing partners page. This list is updated on a monthly basis.
What information do I need to provide?
Though organizations are encouraged to share a variety of information about their grants, only ten fields are required and a few more highly encouraged.
| Required
- Recipient Name
- Recipient Street Address
- Recipient City
- Recipient State/Province
- Recipient Country
- Grant Currency (if not USD)
- Grant Amount
- Amount Type (Paid or Authorized/Approved)
- Fiscal Year
- Grant Description
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Highly Recommended
- Transaction ID
- Recipient EIN / International ID
- Grant Title
- Geographic Area Served
- Grant Program Area
- Grant Subject(s)
- Grant Population(s) Served
- Grant Support Strategies
- Transaction Type
- Grant Duration (or Grant Start/End Dates)
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Regarding Amount Type, grant lists may contain either Paid amounts (as grants would appear in your IRS tax form) or Authorized/Approved amounts (new grants authorized in a given fiscal year, including the full amount of grants that may be paid over multiple years). When reporting Authorized amounts, please report the full amount of the grant, including those to be paid out over multiple years. Don’t forget to include Grant Duration (in months) or Grant Start Date and Grant End Date, if possible.
For more tips on improving the quality of grants data shared, please refer to the following posts from our "Data Fix" series:
Dos & Don'ts for Data Mapping & More!
Dos & Don'ts for Reporting Geographic Area Served
Providing a detailed grant description is one of the best ways to ensure that your data will be accurately coded to capture the subject, population, geographic area served and support strategy you intended and, ultimately map correctly.
In general, a good grant description includes the following information:
- WHAT: What is the primary objective of the grant?
- HOW: How will the objectives of the grant be achieved?
- WHO: Which group or groups are meant to benefit from the grant?
- WHERE: What geographic location(s) is the grant meant to serve?
What's the best way to report fiscal sponsors?
The "Complete" version of our Excel-based format includes a column to note fiscal sponsor when the recipient project’s name and location are used in the required fields. However, since many recipient projects don’t have the complete data required for these fields, there’s a second option: Use the fiscal sponsor’s name and location in the required fields, as well as their EIN and URL. Add the recipient project’s name (and URL if available) to the grant title or grant description fields.
How are my grants data coded by Candid?
To facilitate the use of this information, Candid codes grants data with subject, population, support strategy, transaction type and geographic area served codes. To learn more about our Philanthropy Classification System please visit http://taxonomy.candid.org/.
For the most part, data we collect are coded in an automated process with review by data experts. The automated coding process is trained for accuracy with a supervised machine learning model. If you would like to have more direct control over how your data is coded, please include the appropriate codes in the data you submit to us.
If you’d like to know more about our coding process, please refer to our Grants data fact sheet or contact us at egrants@candid.org.
How frequently should I share my grants data?
You should share your grants data at least once a year. We encourage organizations to submit more frequently – such as quarterly – to ensure that the sector has access to the timeliest information.
How quickly will my information appear on my complimentary map?
Your data will appear on your map within 10 business days, if not sooner.
How can I feature my map on my website?
We recommend either providing a link to your map on your grants page or adding a map link to a screenshot of your map. When visitors click on the image, the map will open in a new page.
We advise that you do not embed the map on your website, as it will not display in Chrome due to their browser requirements.
What should I do if corrections need to be made to my data?
If you notice any errors or need to make changes to your data after it has been processed, just email egrants@candid.org. We will take care of any needed changes right away. If you do not already do so, we encourage you to include your internal grant ids in data you submit to us. This will make the process of making corrections easier and more accurate.
How will my grant information be used and shared?
By sharing your grants data once, you are helping power several products and resources that serve the social sector. These include Foundation Directory Online (FDO), Foundation Maps, issue- or location-specific “Foundation Landscapes,” reports, online dashboards of philanthropic giving in a region, and more.
In short, it should be assumed that any data sent to us will be published in Candid platforms. Please do not share information with the project that may not be made public. For more information on how to share sensitive grants data, please see the next FAQ.
How do I responsibly share sensitive grants data?
Candid is committed to being a responsible steward of the data that is shared with us. We recognize that in some cases it may not be possible to share full details about your grants, and that circumstances can change, making grants data that was once safe to share more sensitive. This FAQ provides guidance for how to share your data with Candid and what to do if your organization finds itself in the latter situation.
When sharing your data, please keep the following things in mind:
- Any grants or individual grants details that should not be made public should not be shared with us. It should be assumed that any data sent to us will be published in Candid platforms. If the work covered by the grant is of a sensitive nature, please refer to the first question below, “What are my options for sharing sensitive data?”
- Email is not a secure means of transferring sensitive data. Please do not include such data in what you share with Candid or our partners, even if it comes with instructions to anonymize or exclude certain details. Sensitive data should be anonymized, aggregated or removed by your organization before it is shared externally.
- The degree to which you anonymize or exclude data should reflect the degree or nature of the risks associated with sharing that data. For example, if there is a high likelihood that the safety or lives of a grantee’s staff could be put at risk were details of the grant to be made public, your organization may opt to anonymize several aspects of that grant, or if necessary, exclude it entirely from what is shared with Candid.
What are my options for sharing sensitive data?
| Field
|
Notes
|
| Recipient name
|
List recipients as ‘Anonymous Recipient’ or ‘Anonymous Individual(s)’
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| Recipient location
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If anonymizing the recipient alone is not enough, information about the recipient’s location can be excluded to different degrees:
- Exclude street address
- Exclude street address and city
- Exclude street address, city, and state
- Exclude street address, city, state, and country (in this case location would be a region)
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| Grant text
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Grant text can also be excluded to different degrees. Depending on the degree and nature of the risk, the following fields can be excluded:
- Program area(s)
- Grant title
- Grant description
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| Grantmaker name
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If there are potential risks to the grantmaker as well, the grantmaker name can be anonymized in Candid’s records. The grantmaker name would appear as “Anonymous Funder”
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If these anonymization or exclusion options are not enough, funders can also submit their data to Candid as an aggregate. For instance, you can provide us with a total amount funded to a particular geographical region for a specific issue area such as abuse prevention and we’ll process the data as one grant to an anonymized recipient in that region, coded for abuse prevention as the subject and for that total grant amount.
How do I remove or modify grants that have previously been shared with Candid?
In rare cases – such as those where security risks arise – it may be necessary for Candid to delete or modify a grant or set of grants from our database and products.
If deleted, the grants information would no longer be available in Candid databases, products and platforms. In these cases, we will not be able to re-add the grants data if the security risk no longer poses a threat.
A less permanent solution to address security concerns involves anonymizing grants data.
Who do I contact if I need to anonymize or delete existing data?
To request that grants be anonymized or removed from Candid databases, please send requests to egrants@candid.org.
How long will it take before the changes appear?
If anonymization is requested, we may suppress grants temporarily in our products (i.e., Foundation Maps, Foundation Directory Online, etc.) while we work to modify the data to reflect the chosen level of anonymity. Once we’ve landed on a course of action, it will take up to two weeks before these modifications are reflected in products.
If deletion is requested, data will be suppressed in all of our products within one to two weeks and deleted completely from our databases within one month.
For more information on this topic, please see Are You Over or Under-Protecting Your Grants Data? 5 Ways to Balance Transparency and Data Protection in Sensitive Contexts and Sharing Data Responsibly: A Conversation Guide for Funders.
Who should I contact if I have more questions?
If you have any additional questions, please contact Candid at egrants@candid.org.
